Airnet Plans To Cut Jobs While It Tightens Its Belt

Telecommunications

AirNet Communications Corp. of Melbourne is joining the long line of telecommunications companies shedding employees and trimming budgets as demand plummets.

The company, which manufactures equipment used in wireless phone systems, plans a restructuring that would affect about a quarter of its work force and contractors. The company has about 270 employees.

It also announced that it plans to cut expenses by nearly a third. Last year, the company lost $45 million on sales of $35.3 million.

The layoff announcement comes less than two months after the 7-year-old Harris Corp. spinoff announced the sale of $30 million of convertible stock to three venture-capital firms.

AirNet is developing new technology for wireless base stations that will be used in the deployment of third-generation cellular-phone technology.

BELLSOUTH ADDS SWITCHING CENTER

BellSouth Corp. has fired back at a consortium led by Orlando's Epik Communications Inc. with the deployment of an optically switched data-transfer center in South Florida.

The center, called a network access point, or NAP, rivals one recently opened in Miami by the Epik-led group. Both centers are designed to hand off data calls between giant Internet server networks such as America Online and Worldnet.

Epik and BellSouth use different technology. The BellSouth service uses several South Florida switching centers working in tandem, while Epik's is located in a single building in downtown Miami.